Exhibition: The Old and the New

I was fortunate to show work alongside Dorothy Ramsay and Andrea Kershaw at Gallery 4a in the centre of Penrith over the Easter holidays in 2023.

As the local paper News and Star put it, we came together as “three talented artists, each of whom brings their own distinct style and approach to their work”.

I brought some recent work about climate change, alongside new work that has been developing in the background for a while.

The more I dig into the relationship between art and physics, the more I find—everything from artist residencies at CERN to Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud sculptures.

For this show, I was thinking about the first second after the universe came into being: a quantum soup of energy that expanded, cooled, and settled enough for the first particles to form. It’s an idea that’s hard to hold in the mind—unimaginable in scale—but it’s also a frontier in cosmology and fundamental physics, and a source of inspiration for my work.

These works on paper move back and forth between hand drawing, building software, drawing by robot, and painting by hand. That complicated process feels connected to the subject matter: indeterminacy at small scales, inter-connectedness, and the way things emerge from energy.

The works formed a small wall display. I’m planning to rework it, and possibly develop it further, for an upcoming exhibition.